


Cut Your Bangs

by Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard



Series: In Another World [3]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Catharsis, Epilogue, F/M, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:41:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25835926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard/pseuds/Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard
Summary: Carys sends her love.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas
Series: In Another World [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1806586
Comments: 24
Kudos: 65





	Cut Your Bangs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beaubashley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubashley/gifts).



> For beaubashley, and all her encouragement with 'In Another World.'

_Last night I saw your face in the hallowed light_

_You were standing taller than the mountainside_

_Your long hair flowed down in blues and whites_

_And I just stood there, bathed in the quiet._

-Cut Your Bangs, Girlpool.

There was a new spirit in Skyhold. Solas could not help but think of it as Skyhold, even if the open plateau would never, he hoped, come to be the place where he separated the sky from the earth. He first noticed it the day that he dismantled the tent and began to carry his personal effects to the top of the highest tower, where he planned to make his permanent residence.

On this day he was examining his battered countenance in the mirrored vanity. He thought he might need to grow out his hair again. Cutting it had been a public statement, and one he thought it too early in the timeline to make, even if he no longer bore Mythal’s vallaslin. He still needed Pride’s friendships and favors and connections. Bareheaded, bare-faced, skin showing the wear of thousands of years--he probably needed to let his hair grow or he might not even be recognized. He first saw the spirit over his shoulder as he rubbed a hand over the fine stubble on his scalp. 

Many spirits visited Skyhold, so a new one was not so unusual. No few had followed him out of the Fade, intrigued by the heady mix of emotion and power he had trailed as he trudged back through the tragedy he had made of his too-long life. He turned none away; he would not scruple to disdain the assistance of Regret or Valor or Sacrifice. He needed their help. 

Poor Istannis, still holding open the mirror, had been shocked into insensibility to see Fen’Harel emerge at the fore of a host of his kin from the Fade, demanding answers and accommodation. Solas had been in a rather ugly mood that day, after all, and it was only Istannis’ misfortune to be the first of the Elvhen to meet Fen’Harel. 

Solas hoped for a better end for Istannis, this second time around. The first had left him and every other man, woman, and child in Isenatha’vhen dead along with their goddess, slain by the other Evanuris. If Solas hoped not to bury him again, it was not too much to ask for his aid, was it? No. He passed three days there and left with all the spirits and no few of the Sentinels.

The spirits had assisted him in raising Skyhold again. He did not use the plans his younger self had drafted for a great library, though they were better than he remembered. Nor did he rebuild the vanished fortress of his rebellion. Instead, he simply raised Skyhold as it had existed in the Inquisition. The simplest solution, he told himself. The memory was bright and clear in his mind, easy for his friends to build up out of his thoughts. It took less than six months to achieve this first priority. A place for his rebellion to grow. 

“You thought you wouldn’t imagine the smell of her hair if you built a new bed,” the spirit pointed out, cross-legged on the foot of the furniture in question. 

Solas turned away from the mirror to regard the new one: it was hazy and poorly-defined, more of a suggestion of an elf than a depiction of one. 

“I was not imagining anything,” he pointed out. “She was here.” And now she is not, he told himself. 

He had thought of this as a clean break between his mistakes and his memories. A new start. As always, he had failed to fully account for the consequences of his actions. Her actions, more like. 

He knew that he would always see the world through a window bearing her fingerprints, but he had failed to anticipate how it would feel to find her scarf in a drawer in the Isenatha’vhen guest chambers. Two strands of her hair stuck to the pillow in his tent. A spirit of love perched on his bed, struggling to form her features out of the cast of his heart. Falon’Din’s vallaslin in thick green lines, the long robes of a Dalish First. 

“Please do not do that,” he told it as gently as he could. 

He did not know why Love had come to Skyhold, but he imagined it would not stay long. 

***

He saw it from time to time over the next few years. As soon as Skyhold was completed, he left it to begin recruiting for his third rebellion. He told himself that it was merely the next logical step, and not because he had been a sentimental fool to recreate the hallways and balconies on which she had once walked. 

He knew already which ears might bend to his suggestion, which doors might open to him. It was almost easy to stop the machinery of the Elvhen state which fed resources to Ghilan’nain’s laboratories, to incite nobles against Andruil’s excesses. To recruit disaffected young elves and arm them to cull the ranks of the Evanuris’ defenders. He had done it before. 

He did not know why Love persisted at Skyhold. There were any number of other people better suited to capture its attention than him, even people at Skyhold. 

He had imagined feeling less of this incessant grief when he returned to this time, even if of course that was not his reason for arranging things thus. This was before any of his irrevocable mistakes; why did he have any reason to mourn for things that would never happen? 

He had hated a world that felt full of Tranquil. And he had exchanged it for one that felt full of ghosts. 

Istannis in the Isenatha’vhen, not dead in its halls. Lida in the high priest’s robes, not spending out life force in the Vir Abelasan. Felassan pounding on the gates of Skyhold instead of dead at his own hand. 

He tried very hard to send him away the very day he arrived, but whatever events had transpired over his absence had left Felassan without any respect for Solas’ authority or sense of his own dignity.

“You look like shit,” Felassan told him, violet eyes crinkling in concern. “Like June’s wrinkled ballsack.”

“Did you need something?” Solas asked him testily. He resolved not to use Felassan, this time around. Of course, the man was unreliable. And he looked well without Solas’ intervention. And he might ask questions that Solas did not really feel like answering. Such as--

“Where is she?” Felassan asked, peering around Solas as though he might be hiding her somewhere in the great hall. 

His brow furrowed as his gaze landed on Love, lurking at one of the banquet tables behind Solas. She had the vallaslin straight now, as well as the green scarf Solas was certain he had hidden at the bottom of his wardrobe, but a number of other details were incorrect. But Felassan was fooled no more than Solas. 

“What did you do?” Felassan demanded when Solas did not answer. 

No need to posture as though he did not understand. 

“She went back to her world,” Solas said. “She had what she needed.” 

Felassan’s upper lip curled. “You big fucking idiot.” He regarded Solas unevenly for a few awkward moments and then brushed past him with his luggage. After a few minutes, a young dwarven man followed after Felassan, carrying an additional trunk, giving Solas no more than a curious look as he went. 

Solas decided to tell Felassan and his friend that they did not live in Skyhold on a different day and went up to his chambers to have a private cry. 

This small plan was still feasible with the spirit seated on his desk, swinging her legs as she waited for him to lock the door behind him, but far less cathartic under her gentle reproof. 

“Felassan would understand if you told him,” she said. “You should go back and explain. You’ll feel better.”

“I have no romantic entanglements with Felassan to interest you,” he told the spirit gruffly. “You need not concern yourself.” 

Love slid off his desk and sat down on the edge of his bed next to him. She laid a slim hand on his back, and Solas tensed at the touch. It was the first time in five years someone had laid a hand on him. The first since her farewell embrace, and he was possessive of the finality of that. 

“He loves you too,” the spirit told him, laying her insubstantial head on his shoulder. “You should let him help you.” 

The mirror was opposite the bed, and the framing of the two of them--white hair spilling across his chest--made him jolt to his feet.

“What is it?” Love asked in alarm, blinking up at him.

Solas shook his head at her. “You do not need to do this for me.”

The words were lost on the spirit: it would be completely contrary to Love’s nature to listen to that sentiment. She reached for his hands, and he yanked them away. 

“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked. 

That made him sigh. Of course he could not ask a spirit to be other than itself. He could only hope it found some object of interest more congruent with its nature than Solas. He did not need Love on his path. 

“Ir abelas,” he told her. He allowed his gaze to trickle down her form; her face was still too young and untroubled to belong to in any respect to the woman who had left small footprints in the sand of this world. This spirit was conjured out of nothing more than his own useless heart.

“Am I wrong?” the spirit asked wistfully. 

“Her eyes were grey,” Solas said, his grief tightening his throat. “Not green. That is all.” 

And he left his chamber to stick his head in a basin of cold water. 

***

When the time finally came to tighten the noose, Solas expected most of Skyhold to follow him into battle. Fundamentally, the Evanuris were gods because they were worshipped. Because the nobility gave them tribute and bound the people they enslaved to their will. That worship was built on equal parts fear and awe. Seeing them defeated in battle--seeing them bloodied, seeing their bodies broken the way any mortal creature’s might be--would do more to destroy their power than anything but the Veil. The war was beginning in earnest. 

On the dawn of the battle, morning found him with his face pressed into a battered pillow, alone, as always, with his regrets. Trying to remember what her hair smelled like. Afraid he had already forgotten.

Until a small foot nudged him in the lower back. 

Solas flipped immediately to his feet, groping for a weapon. Who could have made it through his wards? 

Laughter had him dropping his lightning spell. She found his flailing amusing, it seemed. 

Solas exhaled in exasperation, asking himself again why he did not banish Love from Skyhold and force her to find someone who could actually benefit from her attentions. 

“I could have killed you,” he said grimly. 

She had bound up her hair in a knot behind her head, and dressed as though she planned to accompany him to battle. He squinted at her, placing the armor--ice dragon hide, a trophy of the campaign against Hakkon Wintersbreath. He had a great look at the engraving on her greaves, given that she had one foot propped on his bed. 

“You always thought that, but I’m not so sure,” she responded to his implied threat, unperturbed. “In any event, if you didn’t want me here, I couldn’t come in through the wards.”

And perhaps that was true, but it was hardly fair of her to point that out.

Solas did his best to ignore her, even though he was fairly certain she ogled him as he splashed some water on his face and dressed for battle. 

“Where are we going first?” Love asked, once he had his sword buckled to his hip. 

He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “ _I_ am going to the plains south of Arlathan. I am not certain where, if anywhere, _you_ are going, except not there.”

She looked mildly amused at that. “How do you propose to stop me, ma sa’lath? You’re already late, and if you try to sit on me, you’ll only get later.” 

He found his lips curving up in an emotion he only faintly remembered. 

“If you want me to tie you up, you will have to ask me nicely at a later time.” 

Her face was now openly delighted. The expression fell as Solas remembered himself and steeled himself against her. 

He strove next to appeal to her common sense, though he told himself that there was no reason such a trait should be expressed in a spirit of love. 

“This will be no place for you. I must fight, and I must do it convincingly, and I must do it bloodily, or all of this will be for naught,” he told the spirit. “I need Valor, and Victory, and even Wisdom and Purpose, but you would not like what you would see today.”

She shook her head in reprove, stepping closer to him. She laid a gloved hand on his arm, and oh--she even had the small details right now. The little freckle at the corner of her right eye. The angle of her chin as she looked up at him through snowy eyelashes.

“Did you think I did not love you very fiercely? All I wanted was to fight at your side, if you had only let me. I can take care of myself. But what I want is to take care of _you_.” 

He struggled to pull himself away. “ _Your_ love?” he repeated. 

Love pursed her pink mouth in confusion. “Did you think it was your own feelings that drew me here?” 

Solas’ heart pulsed painfully on his chest. Any other possibility was too devastating to consider. 

He had no time for this. His officers were waiting for him, he _was_ late. 

“Why are you still here?” he burst out. “I have nothing to offer you. It has been _years_. Have you not seen?” 

But she only smiled at him in beautiful sympathy. “I see you. And we have all the time in the world, my heart.”

***

The morning after Falon’Din fell from the sky under a rain of simple wooden arrows and found no willing body to lift his soul up again, Solas told himself not to expect to feel any different. He had known for centuries what he needed to do; accomplishing it was only a different perspective on his duty from planning it.

So rather than celebrate with his forces, he was up in his bedroom, working through correspondence at his desk. Power vacuums would want filling; if he did not wish the same situation to reoccur in five hundred years, he would need to nudge better structures into being.

Perhaps fifty more years, he bargained with himself. Fifty more years, and then he could seek the oblivion of uthenera. 

She never bothered to knock. The door opened, and closed, and he knew who it was. He did not look up from his letters. 

She paused in front of his desk, hands on hips, staring him down so directly that he had to sigh and put his pen down. 

“I begin to think you’ve actually got some sort of a kink for self-flagellation,” she said. 

“Funny,” he said, stoppering his ink bottle and looking up at her. He startled a bit. She looked different. Older, maybe. A few laugh lines around her eyes. Her hair was longer, but caught back in a clip behind her head. He did not think he had ever seen her wear it in that style. Or the robes she wore, Dalish in cut, but woven of tasteful blue seasilk rather than simple samite. 

In his hesitation, she set a hand on his desk and then her hips, swinging her legs over the top of it and knocking a number of still-wet scrolls to the ground. Ignoring his growl of frustration, she climbed into his lap so that she straddled his thighs.

“Damn it, Carys,” he swore, and then clicked his teeth shut around his words, the sound like a trap closing. 

She twined gentle arms around his neck. 

“Say it again,” she instructed. 

He sucked in a breath and held it. 

“You are not her,” he said at last, and he cursed himself for the note of hesitancy in his voice. He strove to eliminate it. “You cannot change your nature by wishing.”

“Can’t I?” she asked. 

He gave her a hard look. Tugged on one loose tendril of white hair. “ _This_ is not Carys. Or even if...if she still thought of me. What she felt about me. It was not all there was to her.” 

“‘Felt?’ I _feel_ ,” she said, taking his hand and pressing it over her heart. He could feel it beating through her chest, vital and animal and strong. 

“How would you even know?” he whispered. “There is still the Veil between us.” When he closed the mirror at Isenatha’vhen, it should have severed that last remaining link between his world and hers. 

She smiled. “You give yourself too little credit.” She fluffed out her hair over her shoulders, rocking against him as she did. 

Solas squirmed beneath her. He was running out of logical arguments against simply wrapping his arms around her and ceding their decade-long argument. 

She pressed her forehead against his own. 

“You built me a house on a hill south of Halamshiral. We said vows in front of my Keeper,” she whispered. 

He closed his eyes so that tears could not leak out of them. “I did no such thing. And you are only telling me what I want to hear.” 

He had never done a single thing for Carys that he could be proud of, except for walking away from her at the last. 

She pressed light kisses over his closed lids. “Am I?” she said softly. “You don’t look like you want to hear it.” 

Solas drew in a shuddering breath. “I would want to hear it if it were true,” he admitted. 

She wiped thumbs over his cheekbones. “I’m here because it’s true,” she said. “Because I never stopped loving you, in this world and that one, in all the different times and places the Fade connects. I love you here. I love you five thousand years from now, when I look up at a sky full of stars and magic. If the Fade exists in all times and places, so do I. I am no more impossible than you, Pride, Solas, Fen'Harel. Vhenan.” 

He bent his face into the bend of her neck and sobbed, and she made little shushing sounds over tiny endearments. 

“Carys,” he said when he was done. More to feel the sound of her name on his tongue after so many years than to draw her attention. 

Her grey eyes spiderwebbed at the corners when she smiled at him. She adjusted her seat in his lap as though she planned to stay there for some time. 

“Now and always,” she told him. "Vir suledin." 

**Author's Note:**

> I had always planned to leave the ending of In Another World somewhat ambiguous as regards Old Solas--since his end IS ambiguous at this point, and I was trying to write within the confines of canon. But a number of people asked what happened to him back in Elvhenan, and I have done some thinking about that. 
> 
> This is not WHAT happened in Elvhenan, since your guess is as good as mine. This is not a second epilogue. This is only ONE thing that could happen to him. But this idea was the hopeful one to me. 
> 
> Apologies if anyone was expecting this to make sense outside of 146k of elf angst in 'In Another World.'


End file.
